


Rail Bird

by solysal



Category: Persona 5, Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M, Multi, or they will be eventually, whether it’s clusters or personas these kids are pretty damn terrifying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 04:24:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13803333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solysal/pseuds/solysal
Summary: They had the wrong kid--but, Akira supposed, it was better than them having the right one. The one who had the answers to their questions. The one who knew where the others were.





	Rail Bird

Kurusu Akira had a life before this. On the good days, he remembered it.

He collected pieces--bursts of laughter along the roar of the subway, ice cream and bubble tea and freshly-cut watermelon, his mom’s eyes over the rim of her glasses--and rearranged them over and over and over. It was a way to pass the time, like trying to catch the light with broken glass. There wasn’t much else to do here, otherwise.

His cell was six by eight feet, with a sink and a toilet in one end and a bed and a high, barred window in the other. Narrow slats of shadow welled up under the threshold of the door in the front wall, and he’d long since given up on reading any kind of meaning into the patterns that cut through.

Officially, he was dangerous. It was something they reminded him of constantly, the men in black suits that punched and kicked until he could taste the blood on his teeth. “Tell us,” they demanded, a fistful of his hair bunched tight in a fist. “Tell us where they are.”

Akira didn't know. He never knew. He thought of the woman on the street, the shake of her voice as she backed away, the gasp she stifled behind her hand when he stepped between her and the man in the headlights, the stutter of her eyes to the floor as she pointed to him for the police, “The boy, he’s the one who started everything.”

“There's no point in hiding anything,” the men in suits told him. “We’ll find them with or without your help. The only difference is how many bones you break along the way.”

Akira grinned. They had the wrong kid. His teachers skipped over him during roll call and scribbled empty little things about attendance and punctuality in his report cards. His classmates invited him to their birthday parties and messed up the characters for his name on their thank you cards. He was always the one in the back of the bus, on the edge of the bleachers.

They had the wrong kid--but, he supposed, it was better than them having the right one. The one who had the answers to their questions. The one who knew where the others were. The thought stretched his grin sharp and wide.

The men in suits traded glances, then stomped on his stomach until he passed out.

…

Akira opened his eyes and flinched into bright, fluorescent lights. He realized, somewhere under the pinched throb of his skull, that he was outside his cell. He heard a woman's voice, like frays through velvet, like the shuffle of wind through a field.

“Do you honestly expect me to believe this was some kind of schoolyard spat? He’s still unconscious. The bruising on his stomach is the kind of thing you see in car accidents. He needs a hospital. Don't waste your time here.”

He tried to sit up, digging his fingers into the plastic cushioning of the exam table, then immediately fell back at the flare of needles bursting across his torso.

“Your concern's noted, Dr. Takemi. It's a testament to who you are as a doctor that you can even find it in yourself to speak on his behalf--”

“Don't give me this bullshit about ‘my integrity as a physician,’ it's literally my fucking job--”

“Is it? Your colleagues didn't have such bleeding hearts when we brought him to the regional hospital. What was Dr. Oyamada saying? Oh, yeah. 'We would be doing the world a service to let him suffer.'”

“You’ve got to be kidding me--”

He was in some kind of clinic, he decided, which was new, if nothing else. They’d never hurt him this badly before. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if Dr. Takemi kept asking questions. She couldn’t get caught up in--well--whatever this was. Not because of him. He braced himself for the batter of his lungs against his ribs and pulled himself up.

A steadying hand pushed at his shoulder. A hollow-faced woman with bob-cut blue hair and dark eye shadow hovered into view. “Oh no you don’t, kid. You lie there like a good little corpse until I say so, got it?”

He shook his head, clenching his teeth when the motion twisted the world into a lurching spin. “I’m fine.”

Dr. Takemi’s hand on his shoulder tightened.

“I’m fine,” he repeated, more firm this time. “I promise.”

Dr. Takemi chewed her lips, tilting her head to scan his injuries. She stood and folded her arms. “Bring me my ultrasound machine. I need to check and see if he has any internal bleeding. I’ll also want a Chest X-Ray and a CT of his head.”

“That's a tall order for a walkie talkie--” Akira turned to look at the man in the black suit who spoke, sallow-eyed, loose coils of muscle rolling under his skin.

“I don't really care if it's difficult,” Dr. Takemi shrugged. “He’s my patient. It's my license on the line if he dies.”

“Dr. Takemi--”

“Hmm, I was on the fence about getting a CT of his abdomen, but the more you stand there the more I’m convincing myself.”

The man’s jaw tensed, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists. Dr. Takemi slouched with her hands in the pockets of her white coat, but the stare she leveled at the man from under the cover of her bangs was iron, heavy and cold. Finally, the man nodded. “I’ll make arrangements,” he called over his shoulder, pulling out his cell phone and walking out the door.

Dr. Takemi sighed, then opened one of the cabinets on the walls. Akira glanced around as she rifled through her things. The room was small, with chipped wood and scuffed floors, but meticulously clean.

“If you wanted a hotel suite, you should've pushed harder for the regional hospital,” Dr. Takemi said, pulling up a chair and sitting across from him. “You honestly don't think I buy this story about you getting into a fight with the other kids in the juvie center, do you? What happened to you?”

He winced as she wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm. “I fell,” he answered.

The blood pressure pump fell out of her hands. “You fell,” she repeated, slowly.

Akira pulled his lips into a close-eyed smile, barbed edges shooting through the bruises around his mouth. “It was a bad fall.”

Dr. Takemi let out a short huff of a laugh and picked up the blood pressure pump from the ground. She stopped asking questions.

…

Dr. Takemi had dismissed him from her office with pain killers and orders for no strenuous physical activity for at least a week.

“It's a miracle you scraped by with just a few cracked ribs. There's not much I can do for those, unfortunately. Just something for the pain while we wait for them to heal. On the bright side, I didn't see any signs of internal bleeding on your scans, so I’m okay sending you out for now. That said,” she had paused, smiling sweetly at the men in suits on either side of Akira, “if you get into any more fights I might have to get the news involved. The public has a right to know if our juvenile detention centers are so poorly supervised.”

The men in suits had coughed and shifted and Akira had mouthed “thank you” despite how much it had hurt. He didn't believe for a second that Dr. Takemi could really threaten them, not with her tiny clinic stuffed at the back of an alleyway, but she was willing to put herself on the line and say so anyway. The thought sat hot and tight in the center of his chest long after the sting from his fractures began to fade.

The men in suits left him alone for a week as promised, even letting him out into a walled off courtyard with a lawn so carefully manicured Akira was surprised he was allowed to walk on it at all. He lowered himself to the ground, working the ache out of his knee, trying not to linger on how it kept catching and locking at all the wrong times. He lay on his back, marveling at the shafts of sunlight falling through his fingers. It was the warmth that struck him more than anything else, like his dad’s hands ruffling through his hair, suffusing from the surface of his skin all the way down to his bones. It was a shutter frame from before: he would slip into homeroom the next morning and miss all his teacher’s questions and convince himself that his cell, where even the sheets pulled the heat from his skin, was just part of a very long, very bad dream.

It wasn’t a bad dream, though, because the next thing he felt was a pointed lance nestling into the socket of his shoulder as one of the men in suits yanked him up. He hissed and rubbed his arm while the man removed something out of his pockets and tossed it Akira’s way. Akira blinked down at the glasses in his palm then back at up the man. “You have a visitor,” the man said.

Someone important, Akira guessed, following the man out of the courtyard and down a long, bleak corridor. Someone worth keeping up appearances for. They’d taken away his glasses on the first day he’d come to this place, and Akira had long since given up trying to squint the world into focus. He slid his glasses onto his face, and tried not to lose himself in the first measure of clarity he’d had in weeks. The man opened the door to what looked like an interrogation room where another man--thin, balding, with a pointed beard--sat at a table waiting.

“Sakura Sojiro,” the thin man greeted, standing and nodding. He inclined his head to Akira. “Those bruises look fresh.”

“He got into a fight with the other children.”.

“Oh, is that what we’re going with? You could at least try to make the story believable. There aren’t any other kids in this damn building.”

“He’s been moved to this facility for solitary confinement as a result of his actions,” the man who brought Akira in finished smoothly. “I’ll leave you to it, Mr. Sakura. I imagine you have much to discuss.”

Sojiro rolled his eyes as the other man shut the door behind him, then took a seat and gestured for Akira to do the same. Sojiro ran a hand over his face, tugging the deep wrinkles around his mouth out of shape. Akira got the very strong sense that he would rather be anywhere else. “Look, kid,” Sojiro began. “I don’t know why your parents think I can do anything to help you, but here I am.” He glanced briefly up at the camera on the wall behind Akira, then back at Akira. “I’ll be frank. You’re in trouble. I don’t particularly care what you did to end up here, but I can tell you that your best ticket out is to cooperate.”

Akira twisted to face the camera--his pale, drawn face fish-eyed in the lens--and the men in suits who sat behind it. Sojiro wasn't asking him to act like they weren't there, which was something at least. There was no point in pretending this was anything other than what it was. He folded his hands in his lap, and raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t get cocky, kid,” Sojiro warned. “I was able to call in a few favors, and it looks like these guys will be letting me meet with you every now and then to give your parents updates. It’s not much, but at the very least it should give your folks some measure of peace.”

Akira ran his thumb over his knuckles, moving from one knobby ridge to the other. He couldn’t make himself form words around the sudden pressure in his throat.

“Hey, eyes on me, kid,” Sojiro rapped his nails against the table. “You’re not a bad person. I can see that. Hell, you’re probably better than most. It’s how you ended up here in the first place. So,” Sojiro paused, the weight of his stare suddenly leaden, unyielding, “learn from it. Everybody loves talking about heroes, but they always seem to forget that the good ones end up dead.”

There was something in Sojiro’s voice, like catching your foot on the gravel under a stream, that made Akira lift his head. It occurred to him just how strange it was that Sojiro looked so much older than his parents, that he was so completely at ease in this dismal, foreboding place with an army of cameras and computers picking apart his every move. He wondered why Sojiro talked about heroes like they were fools. Like they were martyrs.

“Whatever the hell it is they want, you give it to them.” Sojiro leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. “You go it?”

Akira looked over Sojiro’s shoulder at the door. “I don’t know what they want,” he lied.

…

They’d thrown him back into his cell the second Sojiro stepped outside the compound. Akira figured the most Sojiro could spare him was one or two fewer visits to Dr. Takemi, but, more than any of that, Sojiro was a bridge. Akira stood on one side, and his parents stood on the other, and now, they could scream their love across the distance and believe it carried through.

He tried to think of his parents, the fine wrinkles nested around his mother’s eyes, the thin bones of his father’s wrists. He tried to think that Sojiro would find them, that he would look them in the eyes and tell them not to worry. He tried not to think that Sojiro was a luxury the men in suits wouldn’t afford except to double as a threat. “Behave,” they didn’t need to say. “Behave, or you’ll lose this one last line to the outside world.”

If Akira put it all together—well, he didn’t have much. He’d spent days, weeks now, trying to understand the questions he was asked, and all he could gather was that, for the first time in his life, someone thought there was something special about him. Something that let him do things that normal people couldn’t. Something that other people had too, people that he could find if he just put his mind to it. He still didn’t know who these other people were, but he hoped, with a strength that surprised him, that they were okay. Like he had opened a door, and found a garden flourishing at the back of his mind.

He’d never been happier to be his normal, boring self in his life. He couldn’t find the others, no matter how much the men in suits hurt him, no matter how many times they made him break. He’d get cut loose eventually. Or killed, though he tried not to think too much about that.

Small comforts, when, as far as he could tell, things actually seemed to be going well for the men in suits. Their visits, initially a battery of questions and beatings and more questions, had dwindled down to interviews just shy of civil. Like they had always wanted reasonable, attainable things. Like suddenly they had all the time in the world.

“Sae Nijima's been assigned to the case,” one of the men in suits told him, settling back into his chair like a bath after a long day at the office. “Are you familiar with her? No, you wouldn’t be. You were such a good kid before all of this.” He grinned, like he and Akira were sharing some kind of private joke. “Sae Nijima is a rising star in the Special Investigation Unit. She hasn’t lost a case. But really, with what we’re about to give her, even a dog could put you away for life. So,” he paused, glancing around Akira’s cell like it was just now striking him how terrible and awful of a place it was, “the question isn’t whether you’ll answer our questions. It’s when.”

Akira wouldn’t go so far as to say he’d gotten better at telling the men in suits apart, but he could already tell he would remember this one. He was the same one, viciously polite, who had swindled his way into Dr. Takemi’s clinic.

“Now, I’m no legal expert,” he continued. “That’s Ms. Nijima’s department. Still, I bet your cooperation would go a long way towards convincing a judge that you were appropriately remorseful for your actions. Who knows? You might even be able to put this whole mess behind you. Go to college. Get a job.” He shrugged, a rippling motion that bunched the muscles under the sleeve of his blazer. “Or you could stay quiet. It’s really up to you. We can wait.”

Akira had gotten used to these kinds of threats, had woven the skin of them into his thoughts. It kept the edge from cutting: this was a losing game, and his only way out was to play it, dutifully, to the end. He just hated when everything fell apart anyway. He doubled over, his nail beds blanching white as he gripped the arms of his chair and heaved. Some small piece of hope had burst, the pieces cutting sharp and deep. Was it the sunlight from the courtyard? Was it Sojiro, nodding from under the rim of his hat? Akira knew—had always known—that this wouldn’t end well. But, fuck, he wanted so badly to win.

He lifted his head to see the man across the table from him. The man’s smirk pulled taut and satisfied, revealing a blunt set of perfectly white teeth. “Take him away,” he said.

Back in his cell, Akira sucked in one lungful after the other, trying to hush the incessant hammer of his heartbeat. The room was collapsing—his brain rattled in his skull, teetering over the yawning pit where his stomach used to be. His hands shook as he grabbed under his bed. The men in suits had forgotten to take the glasses back after Sojiro’s visit, so Akira had stowed them away under his mattress. At night, when they left him alone, he would wear his glasses and pretend he was home.

He tried to slide his glasses onto his face, tried once, twice, three times, before settling for clutching them against the rise and fall of his chest. He let his neck fall back until he felt the cold press of the wall and forced himself to create spaces between one desperate inhale and the next. His body was sick with hunger—for air, for oxygen—but the only way to end this was to find a way to breathe like he wasn’t drowning. He swallowed, the muscles of his throat locked tight, and started to count.

The room settled out, eventually. That’s when Akira felt the cat nipping at his fingers.

...

The cat came and went, with a sense of regularity and timing that made Akira suspect that it actually understood concepts like wrongful imprisonment. Akira started to save bits of cheese and fish from his daily rations in anticipation. Sojiro would probably call him foolish, lecture him about how the men in suits barely fed Akira enough to keep him from starving to begin with. But Sojiro wouldn’t find out, and besides, Akira liked the cat better anyway.

Tonight, the cat had gulped down Akira’s offering of imitation crab and set about fastidiously kneading the spot above Akira’s right kneecap. Akira let his hand hover over the cat’s ears before hazarding a cautious pat.

“I should probably be more concerned about how you got here,” Akira mused. “I don’t think this is a good place for cats. The people here have guns. Real ones. They could shoot you, you know.”

The cat purred and nuzzled his palm, which Akira decided to interpret as a green light. He rubbed behind the cat’s ears. He’d always wanted a cat, back when the worst thing that had happened to him was landing detention for laughing too loudly in the middle of class. His mother’s nose had scrunched over the sound of his father’s laughter the last time he’d asked.

“I’ve always wanted one too,” his father had chuckled, pulling his mother close to kiss the parting in her hair. “Unfortunately, it’s always been one or the other for her, and only your mother is brave enough to poke around the car’s engine when it stalls.”

“Don’t fall for sweet talkers,” his mother had replied, patting his father’s cheek fondly. “Would you believe he told me he loved me on our wedding day?”

“Let’s hope you’re a better liar than me,” Akira’s father had said, adding a theatrical wince.

Akira had given a long, searching look at his bowl of curry, studiously ignoring his father’s laughter when his mother punched his arm. Akira's classical literature teacher had been guiding the class through a series of lectures on how true love was a powerful and noble thing, and maybe it could be, but Akira had grown up with it, and it had always looked like his father phoning his mother at work, asking her to pick up a carton of eggs on her way home. Or like this: his father, winking over the crown of his mother’s head as she told Akira she would die before she let a cat shed all over the house.

Akira looked down at the cat now, poking at the white patches of fur on its paws and face until it batted his hands away. He tugged the white tip of the cat’s tail for good measure. “You,” he declared, “were not worth the trade off.”

The cat yowled, digging its claws into Akira’s thigh, and went back licking to licking the black stretches of fur that covered the rest of the body.

“Where did you come from anyway? You’re too comfortable around humans to be wild, so you probably belong to one of the people who work here,” Akira continued, aimlessly. “I should check you for cameras or something. You wouldn’t be the weirdest way they’ve tried to spy on me.”

He lifted the cat so that the two of them were eye level. The cat meowed loudly in protest.

“Okay, okay, sorry I asked,” Akira apologized, letting the cat drop back onto his lap. “Keep it down, okay? It wouldn’t be good if we were caught, even if you are evil. You shouldn’t be commiserating with the enemy. I think they’re really big on principle here.”

The cat stretched, yawning widely, before scampering up the wall and winding through the bars of the cell’s window like they weren’t there.

Akira turned towards the window, trying to ignore the way the walls of the cell had started to press in, the strips of moonlight on the floor unspeakably thready and pale. He’d forgotten how it felt to ramble on about nothing at all and have someone listen. The dark of the cell had seemed lighter somehow, like someone had pulled the muscles of his chest apart and he could finally breathe.

“Come back soon,” he called.

The cat turned, swung the tip of its tail in a dismissive flick, and disappeared.  
...

Akira opened his eyes to sunlight, gray and diffuse, filtered through dense plates of cloud. He was looking through a window, the rain-speckled glass blurring the crowds and buildings beyond. He must have slept in again. His parents were always scolding him--he was in high school, he was a second year--he was too old to be sleeping through his alarms. His father pencilled a running tally on the kitchen wall. Akira could already see it, another sharp tick mark for another bus missed. But then, every time, his father would roll his eyes, his mother would grab her keys, and neither of them would say a word when Akira made a beeline for the passenger seat of the family car.

The seat was stiffer than he remembered, the dashboard a darker finish. He reached for the knobs on the radio, tuned, bizarrely, to some sports broadcast that no one in his family had ever been partial to. Maybe it was his mother's idea of punishment. More likely, it was a rental. The family car, much loved since well before Akira’s existence, was now at that stage of life where it was in the shop more often than it was out. That said, the choice of radio station was inexcusable. He turned and turned until he landed on the brightest, loudest bubblegum pop he could find. He angled a cheeky grin at his mother, rapping her fingers against the steering wheel, and found, like someone had ripped the floor from the world, that she wasn't there.

The man in the driver’s seat frowned down at the radio, running a hand through the mess of curls piled on top of his head.“So this is the kind of music you like?” he asked. “You should have said something sooner.”

Akira looked back out the window, registering now the sheer density of the crowds, the way the skyscrapers rose high enough to frame the sky. This wasn’t his hometown. He hadn’t, he realized, been there in a long time. It felt like a victory, in a way, that it had taken him so long to remember—the black of the interrogation room, the black of the suits. His mind had a longer memory of being outside a cell than in it, still grabbed for memories of lazy drives and washed out mornings even as the memories themselves got farther and farther away.

To be clear: Akira had gotten used to waking up in strange cars. The men in suits had a habit of stuffing him, bleary-eyed and half-conscious, into the back seats of armored SUVs. Always two guards in the front, two on either side—like he was some kind of established flight risk, like he hadn’t twisted his ankle the one time he’d tried to jump a fence. This car, though—this car was a sedan. Far from new, but well cared for, littered with hints of smoke and cologne—and nothing special. It was so absurdly normal—so completely unfamiliar—that Akira had no idea to what to make of it.

He read the names of the metro stations as they whizzed past--there was Shibuya, there was Aoyama-Itchome. He’d always wanted to visit Tokyo, though maybe not in a stranger’s car, and definitely not so busy wondering if he was going to be killed to enjoy a second of it. Akira glanced back at the man in the driver's seat, filling away his track pants, the whistle hanging around his neck. He didn’t look like the other men in suits, like he could snap a neck as quickly and easily as making a phone call. He looked like a gym teacher.

The man caught Akira’s eye. “What’s wrong, Ann? You look pale.”

Akira frowned, turning the unfamiliar name over and over like a lens in the sun, waiting for it to bend the light into focus. The men in suits referred to him in code from time to time, sometimes “the asset,” sometimes “number 3,” sometimes “the kid,” but never by name. Not his name, of course, but not the wrong one either. He tried to ignore the slow wave of unease unfolding in the pit of his stomach, tried to hold out the thin hope that this was some kind of charmingly bohemian rescue. He looked at his reflection in the mirror. In hindsight, he really shouldn’t have expected it to help.

He counted yellow hair, and pink lip gloss, and blue eyes, blinking in time with his own—and nothing of him, not even the smallest piece. He touched his face, watched the person in the mirror do the same, manicured nails framing the length of one pale cheekbone. He was—entirely, indisputably—a girl. He swallowed against a sudden wave of nausea, thousands of tiny changes flickering in and out of awareness. His center of mass was shifted, his bones set wider in some places, narrower in others. He felt lighter, and longer, like the tension in his muscles had a looser set point. More than any of that, there were thoughts, like the spin of a storm—on the horizon, at his door, all at once. Akira could drown in them.

_She could do this, she had to do this. It wasn’t fair, none of this was fair, but she could hold on for just a little longer, until Nationals, and then, no one would be able to touch her. She’d block out every single one of those squealing pigs and—_

He—they— _she_ heard the shift of clothes, the strain of Kamoshida shifting in his seat. _Kamoshida_? Akira blinked down at his feet—her feet—and rubbed slow circles against his temples—against the world, magnified, doubled. He couldn’t think—or maybe he could think too much, like a new, frenzied set of hands had started writing the script of his mind. He had never met Kamoshida in his life, but, he knew him, knew, like hacking the rot from the vegetables his parents grew in the backyard, that he hated him. He hated Kamoshida, he hated the men in suits, he hated that they left their fingerprints on his skin, he hated that he had to let them. He turned— _she_ turned just enough so that Kamoshida’s fingers caught her hair instead of her cheek. She breathed out, and the rush of air pulled at Akira’s throat like a scream.

The car slowed to a stop, and Akira—Ann, her name was Ann— had already thrown off the seatbelt, had already thrown open the door, had already thrown herself out the car with half a bow and half an excuse about being late for class. She ran up the stairs. Akira watched her go, looked back at Kamoshida, leaning over the stick shift, and oh, he was watching her, wasn’t he? Akira glanced down, saw the same set of arms and legs that he’d been waking up to all his life, and chased after her.

He found her crouched behind a pillar, her hands on her head as she bent her head between her knees. Her thoughts were still there, surging under the shake of her shoulders like a riptide. _Just a little longer_ , she kept promising herself, _just a few more weeks_. She was his age, Akira realized. He could see pieces of himself there now, but distorted, amplified. He wasn’t sure if it was enough to call common ground. He wasn’t sure if it was—if _he_ was enough to be any help. The only thing he’d been any good at lately was losing. He reached out anyway.

Ann lifted her head. Akira saw himself through her eyes, bony and strange—saw herself through his, spent and alight—and then he—no she—

They passed out.

...

Akira woke up to the same lightless six by eight feet of his cell. He picked out the sink and toilet on one end, the high, barred window and his bed in the other. The same narrow slats of shadow welled up under the threshold of the door, pulled out of alignment by worn-out sneakers pacing back and forth. Not the men in suits, then. Not Sojiro either. The sneakers scuffed to a stop.

“Hey, dude, you okay? You were out like a light.”

Akira looked up. A boy—lanky, blond, wearing a high school uniform Akira couldn’t quite place—looked back. Akira had just enough time to think there was a lot of that in his life lately—blonds and blondes—and then, like a light, he was out again


End file.
